About Humana

The goal of our project is to publish a journal on human rights in the duration of twelve months, two thousand copies per issue, edited by young people.

Each month we will cover different types of human rights violations in a unique and complex way, revealing the roots of the problems, their possible solutions, and their social impact, while maintaining a balance between a theoretical and a popular approach. We will do this by relying on the latest results from experts and young researchers of social sciences, both domestic and international.

Our goal is to publish high quality, meaningful articles for every age group, provoking public interest, helping in the exchange of ideas and propagating active involvement by achieving the public understanding and contemplating of human rights. The project started on 10 December 2009 (Human Rights Day) with a formal event in Tuzrakter.

Some of our editors are recent college graduates, majoring in communication and international studies, who realized how biased and one-sided the domestic media and press can be and how bureaucratic its functioning often becomes. Our editors would like to create their own alternative, versatile journal, based on the interest of the young adult population.

The online version of our journal will be available for all to comment. In addition, every month, 10-15 young people will be able to register to join us in our monthly workshop-style editorial meeting. Together, we will enquire about important human rights issues so they are able to create their own articles in an opinion-based genre. The best creations will appear in the following issue, thus helping all of those interested to get involved in our work.

We would like to offer a chance to recent college, university, and PhD graduates to publish their results in the field of human rights. Sharing it with professionals and their own age group will be beneficial to the journal’s future success, as well as encouraging them to continue their work in the future. It would also be beneficial for representatives of NGOs to appear with public service announcements, with hotline numbers as guidance for those in need.

Structurally, the first part of the journal will consist more serious, meaningful essays, that will speak to the more experienced public, while the second part will be lighter in both style and genre to appeal to the non-expert, average reader. The cultural column will help processing the different themes by offering a selection of activities and programmes such as books and movies and a story section on two pages for the children (and their parents) to become more familiar with human rights, with developmental games included.

For professional help, we asked Dr. Ferenc Kondorosi, who is the editor of the Acta Humana human rights journal and the director of the Human Rights Center Hunagry, and a jurist. He will watch over the legitimacy and legal content of the publications and his experience as an editor gives him the authority to overrule professional decisions.

The themes of the 12 editions are the following:

Human rights (introductory edition –generalities)

The right to life (euthanasia, abortion, contraception, death penalty)

Economic rights (trafficking of humans and organs, starvation, the system of humanitarian aid, genetic modifications, protection of intellectual property)

The fundamental values of the newspaper are equality befor law, democratic values and human rights, freedom of expression and speech and the ensuring diversity. Researching the problems we want to objectively reveal the contradictions of the already established stereotypes, the complexities of the issues concerning human rights. This is how we would like to become an authentic and reliable newspaper source for youth and to combat prejuidice. We would like to bring those topics closer to younger people, which so far have been regarded as incomprehansible (e.g. biodiversity or gene manipulations). We would also like to reveal to them all those aspects that could affect them in their later lives and the way to become an active moulders of public life.

The projects educates tolerance and the acceptance of diversity from the very beginning. The complexity of the given human rights issues will then ensure the actual realization of this principle.